The source of which is living, physical, sentient beings.
Are you also asserting that “thought” could/would exist without material beings that think? And do those thoughts not also refer to some manner of physical reality?
You can believe that thought exists in some dualistic sense. How do you intend to prove that though?
“I think ice cream tastes good” is a fact. And if thoughts are the underlying substance, “ice cream tastes good” is therefore a substantial fact.
Whether it’s an opinion or fact shouldn’t matter. My opinion that “Bush is a slime bucket” still refers to George Bush as much as it is my personal, subjective, biased opinion, and counts as information even if that’s better described as misinformation (according to someone else’s personal, subjective, biased opinion).
What I’m trying to get clear is what exactly you mean when you say that information refers to a law or rule.
Would it be like saying that “gasoline is combustable” refers to the law of combustion with respect to combustable compounds/elements? Perhaps. But I’d prefer to say that it refers to an object (or class of objects) - in this case, gasoline - and simply says something about that object (i.e. the function of reference can be distinguished from the function of stating/describing).
Furthermore, I’d say that what the word “gasoline” refers to, if you’ll grant the above, is not a rule or law, but an object or substance (or class of such) - namely, gasoline - that, according to the description accompanying the reference, comforms to the law or rule so described.
That’s not so say that information can’t refer to laws or rules - for example, to say “the law of combustion is followed by gasoline when set ablaze” does in fact refer to a law/rule, but as you see, that requires placing the “law of combustion” in the position of the reference in the statement.
I guess my overall point is that information doesn’t necessarily have to refer to rules or laws (and furthermore that it doesn’t necessarily have to refer at all - but this can be debated in my other thread).
I think he was referring to “laws” and “rules” more as limitations. Like “people can’t naturally fly” or “Some berries nourish you, whereas some will poison, and kill, you”.
The argument is still flimsy in my opinion, though. Those types of assertions refer to “rules” and “laws”, or limitations, imposed by physical reality.
Indeed. That distinction is important because I like your use of logic here…
And, assuming we can agree that “ice cream tastes good” is not factual in itself, the very thought is not necessarily informative insofar as it is an observation of an opinion – nobody is being informed, a statement is being made to oneself (assuming, again, that you already knew you liked ice cream). I would argue that more as “recognition”, or recall of information, implying a reference to a relationship that has been made to something outside oneself.
I think it is possible that you could drop the “physical” from your first sentence ,as it serves no purpose beyond a kind of limitation (ie, thought is a mere pointless offshoot of a mindless substance).
I think it is possible that beings are not actually physical material, but that they still exist and they still think.And those thoughts refer to facts, which are not dependent on anything being made of physical material.
We all know thought exists, it is it’s nature that we disagree about.You think it needs to arise from something other than thought, I think it may be the case that thought is all there is, and that what makes it real is the laws/rules within it.
Only_Humean,
Facts based on opinion are “facts”.The trouble with “facts” is that they can not be trusted, they change with your opinion. Half-way down your gallon bucket of chocolate chip cookie ice cream your “fact” would have changed to “I think ice cream makes me want to puke”.
Facts are immutable and therefore predictable, “facts” are not. If thoughts are the underlying substance their reality is dependent upon facts.
gib,
All I’m saying is that facts create our reality. We have personal views about things which we can believe to be our reality, but they are often wrong.There is good information based on facts, there is bad information based on “facts”, but most of our information lies between the two…obviously the nearer these particular “facts” are to facts , the better (In other words “facts” can still be very useful).
Information based on facts (rather than “facts”) has to refer to predictable rules/laws because they are what make them usable. For instance, I know that if I am thirsty a glass of water will help, that is not an opinion (“fact”) , it is a fact based on a law that says human beings need water to live.
Well, in an intangible fact-based universe such as yours, if there are any such laws/rules, and if they are to be effective at all, they must be akin to the rules/laws of logic or mathematics (as opposed to physical laws such as that of combustion). Am I right so far? This works to dinstinguish between your facts and “facts” as well as both can exist in a world of pure thought yet the former adheres strictly to said laws/rules whereas the latter don’t have to.
But if I can bring us back to the point, I would still maintain that insofar as reality and experience can be conceptually unified with the term “information”, it will never be as simple as tossing out “matter” or “physicality” in place of “mind” or “consciousness”, for such a move seems paradoxical when you consider the whole point was to unify this duality.
I can understand the tradition that stands behind your views (it’s Berkeley’s right?) which standardly tries to replace material reality with ideas, but it seems to overlook the fact that what we mean by “material reality” just is what we are experiencing (that it might all boil down to ideas is irrelevant to this) - that is, “material reality” just is the translation, if you will, of the information that constitutes our experiences and, if we really want to unify them, reality as well.
In other words, the whole program of unification simply opposes the program of mutual exclusion. One can’t call himself a monist and an eliminitavist at the same time (lest he wind up in troubled philosophical waters).
So
Regarding the second paragraph:
Is “that rod is made of plutonium” not a fact, if it refers to a rod that is made of plutonium?
Is “that rod will be made of uranium in a few thousand years” not a fact, if it refers to a rod that is made of plutonium?
Given the radioactive chain (IIRC you end up with lead after a few billion years), the second statement is both mutable and predictable. I may be taking an old-fashioned view of fact, though; is it more or less “something that is the case”?
Yes, I suppose they would be akin to the laws of mathematics.
My problem with the concept of " physical matter" is that , for me, it means existent outside of mind and it implies duality.
I don’t see there being an issue of duality with the form of idealism I’m putting forward either.If we view the mind as a kind of mirror that reflects reality, but can also distort it (wilfully or accidentally), then there are no two substances, there are just right thoughts (reflections) and distorted ones. There is only one substance (thought) which is distorted by the “mirror” (self). The self is a thought process too, so although it is separate to a degree (from external reality), it is not utterly separate, it is a sub-set.
Not all facts about thoughts are “facts”, because not all thoughts are opinion.
Thought is all there is with this idea,( I ain’t saying it is necessarily a true idea), thoughts can be right or wrong, so we have facts and “facts”.As I have said ,“facts” can still be useful if they have a high truth content.
I knew that the use of the word “immutable” by me may have been a mistake as it can be misconstrued.What I meant by it is that if I take a bite of an apple, when I look at the apple there is a bite out of it (unlike, in say , a dream).There are predictable rules to this existence that appear immutable,but I’m not saying that things can’t change into other things.
I don’t think it implies this in and of itself. It implies this within the context of classical theories of mind. If mind is thought to be something separate from matter, though somehow with the capacity to be aware of matter, then, yes, matter would have to be outside mind and duality would be implied (quite obviously).
But if you’re going to say that matter is really thought, then you’re veering away from classical theories of mind, and the implication that matter is outside mind and that a duality between them ensues no longer follows (necessarily) from the core concept of “matter”.
Surely you should agree that whether we hold true to classical theories of mind or a form of idealism like yours, the way we experience matter (visually, tactily, etc.) doesn’t change. It’s this experience that I’m referring to and calling “information”, the translation of which I’m rendering as “there is matter there.” If that is the proper translation, then all “matter” implies is that I’m having a particular kind of experience, but to carry that further and say it implies an existence outside mind or thought (in general; not just my mind) requires a commitment to a certain kind of mind theory (a classical one in this case), for the idealism you’re defending subsumes experience (which, as I’ve just argued, is all that “matter” denotes here) under the name of “thought”, which clearly implies that it is in the mind.
I’d be just as inclined to say that we have misunderstood the nature and substance of thought as I would that of matter (i.e. though really can be physical).
gib, I’m smashed tonight, but you always give me food for thought…even when I don’t always fully understand you.
I disagree, we experience matter differently. With one idea ideas are subservient to matter, with the other that is reversed. What do we give power to, the mindless or the thoughtful ?
Whether ideas are subservient to matter, or visa versa, both must exist.
I don’t know any other way of experiencing matter as independent from mind than to bring in preconceived notions of what a “mind” is.
gib,
I see it the other way around. I think we separate matter from mind by having a preconceived idea of matter.I know mind, I do not know matter in the same way, ergo , matter has to be subservient to mind in my understanding.I don’t have a preconceived idea of mind insofar as I directly experience it, whereas matter is another matter.Any preconception must lay in that thing we do not directly experience.
The world exists as idea, the mind does not exist as matter (imo).
We have to have preconceived ideas about both.
How do you experience it, Chester? That is a key question.
Take the visual perception of an apple sitting on a table. What do you experience:
i) an apple sitting on a table
ii) a visual perception
Before you answer this, put yourself in the shoes of a caveman or a 4-year-old. If we are to go with classical or “laymen’s” definition of mind, I’d have to say we experience i). We have a visual perception, or we are undergoing the process of visually perceiving, but what is being experienced, that is the object of experience, is the apple on the table. The mind is needed for this, of course, but it isn’t there in the experience, it underlies the experience.
Of course, not all mental content can be subjected to this sort of analysis. There are such things as mental visualizations or fantasies which I would feel comfortable calling “mental” and saying of it that it is the object of our (introspective) experience. I believe it is the latter which informs us that we do indeed have minds. This is where the whole idea of “mind” originates (imho) way back in prehistoric times (or way back in early childhood).
I fully grant the statement that there is no such thing as mind-independent matter, but as you see this depends greatly on how we define mind. Matter is certainly independent from the primordial conception of mind I just described (i.e. visualization, fantasy, imagination). But to say that there is no such thing as matter at all is not warranted on these grounds, nor on Cartesean grounds (which is more or less the “classical” conception of mind, which itself is far removed from the “primordial” one described above). To say that there is no such thing as matter would require not only a radical reconceptualization of mind on par with idealism (like what you’re doing), but a total neglect of what our sensory experiences seem to be conveying to us with the information that constitutes them. I have no bone of contention with the former move (as I do something similar myself), but it’s the latter that’s unfeasible as far as I’m concerned.
To deny the existence of matter in the face of what our sensory experiences are telling us is, in my view, like saying that there’s no such thing as red, only the perception of red. Red, I would think, only exists as a perception while at the same time maintains everything that is essential to it being red. Likewise, I say, matter only exists as an experience but nevertheless maintains everything essential to being matter. Being mind-independent is not essential in my view (so long as we don’t tie the term “mind” to a particular context - ex. Cartesean, primordial) as that doesn’t so much figure into how we experience matter but how we understand mind.
How do we know what is opinion and what is non-opinion thought?
Ah, OK.
Preconceptions based almost solely on tangible,physical experience and/or observation. That is to say, it seems like mind and matter form a relationship long before one can even begin to “separate” the two concepts.
You know more of the mind than of matter? If I may ask, how?!
You know of your thoughts, and perhaps the (non-physical) mechanics of your thinking. But is that necessarily knowledge of the mind?
If anything matter is far more sensible, however thoughts will always be more personal. In such a case knowing “mind”, in general is impossible - far too relative (personally). Even knowing of your mind is a bit of stretch; you may be familiar with how your mind functions but you’d be hard pressed to define “mind” in its totality.
Not sure about “subservient”, but perhaps subject to interpretation by the mind.
You don’t directly experience matter? And how do you manage to hold no preconceptions about the mind?
We learn of the “mind” much the same we do “matter”. Your preconceptions of both are based on what you know up to this point about each.
Also, how do you directly experience your mind? Are you asserting the mind is physical? If so, that would likely fall under the category of “matter” and you would, in fact, have preconceptions. If, on the other hand, you believe the mind is not physical matter – how do you “directly experience it”?
I believe that what we call “matter” does really exist (but as thought). I believe it is not dependent upon us because it is separate from us insofar as we are not the source of the thought that makes it.We are a source of independent thought (to a degree), our surroundings are made of the same substance but from a different source.
I guess opinion and non-opinion thoughts do get mixed up, but as our knowledge base expands we learn to separate the two through trial and error (to a degree).